


Trained to Make Your Mark

by RurouniHime



Series: Splendor [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angelic Grace Sex (Supernatural), Canon Compliant, Castiel Loves Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester Needs a Hug, Depression, Don't copy to another site, Fix-It, Healing, M/M, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Post-Canon, Post-Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sexual Content, Wing sex, sam winchester is a good brother
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:41:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28996890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: “I just think we should start making some kind of, I don’t know, backup plan because the way things are going—”“Sam.”“Once wasn’t a big deal, this place has held up against a lot, but it’s been two days now—”“Sam.”“—and if there’s much more of this, the walls might literally come down around us, without a grenade launcher.”“Alright.”Dean might actually laugh, uncontrollably. This is the fifth time—fifth! He’s still counting on his fingers! Like a giddy kid!—the fifth time he’s had sex with Cas and this, this…this-ness, the shaking brick and sizzling iron, the shattering windows and the protesting alarms, it was supposed to stop after the first, but it hasn’t evenslowed down.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Series: Splendor [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2127165
Comments: 51
Kudos: 427





	Trained to Make Your Mark

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Nothing Equals the Splendor](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27744514) by [RurouniHime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime). 



> Look, despite the tags, I really just want Dean to be happy. Honest.
> 
> Sequel to [Nothing Equals the Splendor](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27744514). This can probably be read alone but will make much more sense if you read the other one first.
> 
>  **TRIGGER WARNING:** Please read the tags, and if you would like more specific info, see my end notes, which contain minor spoilers.
> 
> Title is from Steppenwolf's [It's Never Too Late](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cg_guXQegQ), which I hold was the best use of music SPN ever gave us (followed closely by Styx's Renegade and then probably Asia's Heat of the Moment). I love this song so much. I love the memories it gives me of the episode it was in, how stirring it was in context with the monster arc, and all that That Scene meant. You know which one I mean.

“So,” says Sam, pushing his mug in an unending circle on the kitchen table.

Dean clears his throat and concentrates on getting the right amount of sugar into his coffee. 

“Uh.” A sigh. Sam throws out his hands. “Look, there’s no easy way to say this.”

“I know,” Dean growls before his brother can gain momentum. His coffee is suddenly unappealing. “Okay? I get it.”

“I just think we should start making some kind of, I don’t know, backup plan because the way things are going—”

“Sam.”

“Once wasn’t a big deal, this place has held up against a lot, but it’s been two days now—”

_“Sam.”_

“—and if there’s much more of this, the walls might literally come down around us, without a grenade launcher.”

 _“Alright.”_ Dean might actually laugh, uncontrollably. This is the fifth time—fifth! He’s still counting on his fingers! Like a giddy kid!—the fifth time he’s had sex with Cas and this, this… _this-_ ness, the shaking brick and sizzling iron, the shattering windows and the protesting alarms, it was supposed to stop after the first, but it hasn’t even _slowed down,_ he is snowed under every time, breathless and slack-jawed, the whole of him alight and utterly unwilling to let Cas out of his arms for even a moment; Cas, who blinks down at him or up at him or over at him afterward as though he’s remembering he’s still on this planet, except yeah, it honestly feels like Dean’s lifted off the face of the earth himself, that’s how fucking gone Dean is, and he refuses to explain that to his stupid brother.

He buries his face in his hands instead.

“Dean.”

“You think I don’t know?” He swings out an arm, just for an excuse to not look his brother in the eye. “I know better than anyone how things are going! I can’t really help that I—” That he what? That he’s some kind of angel upper? Or a specific angel’s upper. See, these are the kinds of existential questions that carom through your brain when you’re engaging in intimate relations with a multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent who has bound himself into the body of a mortal despite being the size of the Chrysler building, a combination that is just _chock full of surprises,_ as it turns out, the least of which being Cas’s inability to predict exactly how he’ll react when Dean—well, when Dean—Yeah, Dean’s got a lot of odd thoughts, including the one about whether he, Dean just-a-guy Winchester, is actually karmically allowed to be putting, well—a part of his, his _body_ inside a—inside, with intent to—to—

He’s a disaster. He can’t even think the words in the privacy of his own head. But that’s okay, because he can damn well remember it with perfect clarity. That… Now, that was a _night._ That was above and beyond, soldier. He’s shocked his nervous system hadn’t completely shorted out. 

It hadn’t. The bunker’s generator and the backup had, though. For his part, he’d barely noticed. The only thing he’d cared about was the person in bed beneath him, trembling and gripping his nape and staring up at him with eyes lit from beneath like there was a storm raging itself to pieces in there. 

Even post-climax as he’d been, each spark drilled directly down the back of Dean’s spine. Man, what Cas does to him.

But the really crazy part, it turns out, the part that has him gloriously and gratefully baffled, is what he can do to Cas.

This last time—and he is never telling Sam this—Cas covered Dean’s eyes, he lost it so bad. Dean remembers whitewhitewhitewhite _white,_ blazing heat, the slick drag of feathers, Cas touching him everywhere at once, inside and out, and then the most spectac—amaz— _indescribable_ orgasm he has ever experienced. 

He’s literally still feeling it. 

No, really. It’s almost impossible to keep still right this second, he just wants to dip his head back and spread his legs and squeeze his eyes shut and roll up into it off this chair—

Ahem. 

So. Yeah.

Angel sex. 

“Hot damn,” he murmurs, and earns himself a bona fide bitch face from the other side of the table.

“Oh, fuck you,” Dean mutters, rolling his eyes. But his cheeks are hot and Sam is now officially laughing at him. Dean kicks his chair. “Shut up.”

Sam’s amusement trickles away. He looks across the table at Dean for a long time, then smiles. “I’m really happy for you.”

Dean blinks at his brother, then smiles tentatively (fragilely, blissfully) back.

“But seriously, man, the bunker’s gonna come down around our ears.”

“I know,” Dean sighs, slumping in his chair. “I’ll... talk to him or, you know.” But now he’s lost, thinking of the blue of Cas’s eyes, thinking of the look on his face when he drops back to the bed, thinking of how hard it is not to pull Cas right back to him every time and keep on keepin’ on. “I just. Sam, I’ve never seen him this... this...” He fists his hands, unable to grasp the right words.

“Happy?”

“Yeah?” His voice goes a little high. 

“Ah, hell, Dean.” Sam lurches forward, a look on his face like he’s planning to reach out, like he equally wants to coddle and throttle Dean, then straightens in a fluid motion and runs his hands through his hair. He shakes his head like Dean has said something painful. “You’re the reason, you know?”

Dean swallows hard.

For a second, things are quiet. Then Dean shakes his head and leans back in his chair. “Nah.”

But he’s grinning.

**

Turns out, there’s a spell for that.

Or there is once Sam gets proper hold of it, tweaks it with a little Southern sex magic, and runs it by Rowena via your friendly everyday cellphone call to Hell, trying his best to be detailed while also not letting on exactly why they need it.

“Has Castiel returned then?” Rowena asks cheerfully over speaker phone. So that ship is already speeding over the horizon. But Dean is, surprisingly, not worried.

“Yes,” he says pointedly, and loudly. “Yes, he has.”

Rowena just laughs. Dean figures he knows what fifth base is now, and then some.

Laying the sigils is an exercise in endurance all its own. A participating party has to do it for it to be the most effective, but a fully graced-up angel will overwhelm the more delicate formative parts of the spell, so by the time Dean’s done lining the room, his whole body is tingling, every nerve a-jitter and something at his core tugging, tugging, tugging in the direction of the hallway where he just knows Cas is waiting.

Fucking sex magic.

Heh.

The new warding gets a good and thorough breaking in, and joy of joys, Sam doesn’t even notice.

**

So that’s a problem solved. Not that Dean would really mind if the bunker came down around his ears, not when he’s in the middle of _that._ As he’s mentioned already, he’s barely aware he’s in a bunker at all by that point.

Honestly, though, it isn’t really as bad as it could have been; Dean thought they’d have had more sex by now.

But what Cas likes best is to kiss him. And what Dean likes best is getting lost in that.

Castiel sleeps now. The strangeness of that gives way quickly to an achy kind of pleasure. Dean doubts Cas needs the sleep. He never had before when he was at full power. But he drops his head to the pillows when Dean does, Miracle stretched in a hot, furry line between them, and he sleeps anyway, an almost silent shift and murmur that could be dreams. Dean likes watching Cas’s eyebrows twitch, likes waking up to Cas’s warm weight beside him, loves it when Cas rouses him by running a hand through Dean’s hair. Dean can count the people he’s woken up with on one hand still, and he never wants to wake up alone again. He hasn’t asked for that, exactly; Cas can come and go as he pleases, Dean’s not about to start banging down boundaries, not when the last three months are still sore on his insides, when touching the thought feels like prodding around a burn. 

But he _wants._ He just...he wants that.

**

Other things Dean likes:

He likes Cas's hand on his chest. Just over his pec, not touching with any intent, really. Simply the weight of it, the small movements as Cas shifts and twitches, and the way his touch trails. Cas shouldn’t have to shift and twitch, but he does, and his fingers are light and warm on skin Dean usually hides under t-shirts and flannel. It’s not even sexual. It’s just weight. Warmth. Motion, unexpected, reminding him they’re both still alive.

He likes when Cas touches him with his wings. The way Cas’s eyelids flutter and his pupils blow dark. The tremor in Cas’s body head to toe when he does it in the middle of sex, their mouths so close that Dean’s words—low, slurred, punching out of him—seem to vanish directly between Cas’s lips. The way Cas’s arms curl under his back, palms splayed wide across his shoulder blades, fingers pressing with each thrust, and then the electric _thrrrum_ as feathers slide up Dean’s sides, up his ribs, his biceps and elbows, dragging his arms up over his head, Dean’s hands fisting in rhythm around silk and spines, his voice cracked and sweat in his eyes, and Cas’s _face._

God, Cas’s face.

Dean can’t actually see the feathers, and that’s trippy as shit, because they feel freaking solid between his fingers. They’re sturdy; they have to be, to take the beating Dean gives them while having his wicked way with Cas. But he’s looked at his hands even as he fingers soft down, and all he sees is a weird shimmer that makes his palm look like it’s melting. Flecks of light, pinprick fireflies… He still remembers that first night, when Cas had come directly to his bedside after Jack brought him back, when the room around Cas’s bare shoulders was inky and fathomless and full of distant lightning. The whole room smells of pine now, and powder, when Cas brings his wings out. Dean doesn’t know what kind of powder. It’s just this soft, dry, grainy smell that in all honesty is starting to have an aphrodisiac effect.

Not that he minds or anything.

(Miracle’s getting pretty good at vacating the premises when things start drifting dirty. Dean’s not sure if it’s the minor angelic explosions or just a general exasperation with the constant demands of the human libido. Suffice it to say, Sam has a new cuddle buddy more nights than not, and he never lets Dean forget it.)

Dean likes talking to Cas, lying beside him on the bed with the lamp on, lips twitching as he tells Cas every lame joke he knows, dad jokes and lightbulb jokes and yo mama jokes, until Cas is curled into his side and trying to make his endless _but why_ s heard over his own wheezing, and Dean is laughing so hard he can’t breathe.

“What… what did the fi… fish say when it… ran into a wall?”

“I don’t know, Dean,” Cas manages against his collarbone.

“Dam.”

Cas snorts—honest to god—and tries to cover Dean’s mouth with his hand. Dean valiantly fends him off, crying out to the ceiling, “Andwhadidth’wallsayback?”

“No,” Cas intones, still gunning for Dean’s mouth. _“No.”_

“You dumb bas—”

Cas finally gets him, both hands over Dean’s face, but Dean is cackling fit to burst. Sam bangs on the wall as he passes down the hallway. Dean loves it. He’s going to burst a blood vessel.

Cas finally kisses them both quiet, and they fall asleep like that, Dean mostly on his side with Cas’s arm around him and his knees tucked behind Dean’s. Miracle huffs once and settles, curled in the hollow made by Dean’s body. Cas wears sweats to bed, and no shirt, leaning heavily into Dean’s back with his fingers turning Dean’s jaw up so he can lavish his mouth, and Dean’s going to have a crick in his neck but it’s worth it for these lazy, drugging kisses. The familiar scents of his room, gun oil and detergent and sleepy dog, blend together with the sumptuous heat of the bed, of them in the bed, and Dean falls asleep just as Cas murmurs his name.

**

He blinks awake, and looks straight into red eyes. 

They burn, twin coals carving holes in the dark. A guttural laugh rattles out of the black. Dean has no time to scream. He flinches back, throws up his hands uselessly to shield his face. 

Behind him, Cas jerks upright. The room fills with sickly sulfurous light just as Cas’s wing slams down around him.

Impact. Shrieks, roars, a wet tearing noise, all in a second. The smell squeezes Dean’s stomach, his throat, his spine, and the air is so _hot._ Dean yells behind the cloak of Cas’s wing, all shimmering darkness spattered into starbursts before his eyes. But somehow he can still see the thing out there, eyes like flame, a hundred claws, trying to get to him through the wall of Cas’s wings. The whole of his living shelter rocks, buffets back into him, but still Cas’s wings remain fastened around him as he curls into a ball and screams into his hands.

A burst of searing white light.

Another blink, and the noise, the heat, are gone. 

The thing is gone.

Then the room floods red, and the bunker’s sirens start to scream.

“Cas?” Dean struggles from beneath the weight, but he can’t turn, can’t get his limbs to behave. “Cas.”

Cas’s weight rolls off him and Dean scrambles onto his knees. He’s unharmed, his body whole. The bed beneath him, the air above him, is dark as pitch, heavy as forever, and his weight presses down oddly, not against cloth but against tendon, pinion, silk: Cas’s wings, melting into shadow under his shins.

“Cas.” Cas’s face flashes red and black, red and black. But he doesn’t move. He doesn’t _move._

There’s moisture seeping under Dean’s knees, soaking the bed.

The flashing emergency lights force him to see. Cas’s body is a wreck, gouged and strafed, afire in tiny embers that burrow and sizzle out in puffs of smoke. Dean grabs his shoulders, strokes down his arms to hands that lie limp on the bed. He holds Cas’s face, but Cas’s face is slack and gray, his eyes half-lidded. Fixed. Dean reaches desperately for his wings, to touch, to spark life, but the feathers, rigid and iridescent and fucking _visible,_ come off in his hands and crumble into ash.

“No,” he chokes. “No, _Cas!”_

Cas doesn’t answer. 

No, no, no, no, no. The sirens wail on, red-black, red-black, Dean feels a howl rising up his gorge, and his heart is this broken, bloody, raw thing in his chest.

 _Dean,_ says a voice, from far away. It’s Cas’s voice, the last echo of the last word he will ever say.

Dean opens his mouth and screams.

 _DEAN._

Someone yanks him around; he spins, on his knees on a quiet dock with a lake lapping below, to stare into Cas’s worried face—

“—ean. _Dean.”_

Dean comes up with a shout, sitting upright and breathing like he’s run the bunker’s entire length. 

“Cas.” His mouth tastes like bile. “Cas—”

“I’m here.” Cas, so close at his side that his body heat beats into Dean’s skin. 

Dean gasps for air once, again, then scrabbles at his throat. Cas’s fingers brush his temple, but Dean shakes his head. He grabs Cas’s hand, holding it where it hovers. Squeezes it. He can feel his own hand trembling.

“Oh, god,” he breathes. He scrubs his face. A dream. “Oh, god.”

Miracle whines, pressed now against Dean’s hip. Cas rises and shuffles around on his knees in front of him. He cradles Dean’s face. The sorrow in his eyes shows Dean he already knows. Already saw. 

Saw, and pulled him out, back to their dock by the lake.

Dean makes a horrible keening noise and drops straight forward against Cas. Cas hauls him up and hugs him tight.

**

Been a long time since he had a dream like that.

But it fades, as most nightmares do. Dean’s had plenty in his life; you just keep moving on, looking at and remembering other things, giving scritches to dogs when they’re demanded, and eventually it becomes a crazy story you tell people over beers, trying to convey a little of the awe it left inside you.

Cas tells him there’s nothing in existence like the thing Dean dreamed up, not that he has ever seen. Dean tells him no doubt, because it was the subconscious manifestation of the clusterfuck that his whole life has been ever since his mom died the first time, that all it wants to do is take away whatever he loves, and that he’s lucky all it had were burning red eyes, because he doesn’t want to see the rest of it, ever. 

Cas takes his mind off things in some delightful ways that involve the removal of all clothing, a shit ton of physical blasphemy against a very willing messenger of Heaven, and the antique headboard finally cracking up the middle because Dean’s just been yanking on it too hard lately.

He’s feeling pretty good these days. Very unwound, very _limber._ Sam keeps shaking his head and threatening weeklong trips to Eileen’s for the sake of his sanity.

He actually ends up bringing Eileen back home more often than not, and Jody, and Donna. The girls trickle in and out as work, school, and hunting permit. Garth and his family drop by for a while, too, and hearing kids laughing as they chase Miracle through the safer parts of the bunker is a singular kind of wonder. Changes the whole place. Dean calls up Jesse and coaxes him and Cesar over for a looksee— _no, I’m not dragging you back into the life, I swear on my adopted kid, I just thought you could use a week off from teaching degrees and horse wrangling._ He doesn’t tell Sam in advance, so when they show up, Sam shouts out loud, then gazelles up the stairs and moose-hugs them both before they’re even fully through the door. 

Introducing them to Castiel is this awkward, shy, special thing, because while Jesse keeps debating with Cas about common religious misinterpretations, Cesar just keeps smiling at Dean over their beers.

He likes opening up his home and bringing people he cares about into it.

When the string of visits is over and the bunker has cleared out of all people unattached (by birth or by bedmate) to the name Winchester, it’s a different sort of pleasure: the pleasure of echoes, of remembering people sitting in chairs alongside him and jeering at the TV, of heading down the hall from the showers and smiling at the memory of Claire’s atrocious bedhead as he’d passed her going the opposite direction. It’s finding leftovers in the fridge from shared meals. It’s kicking back in the war room with Sam at his side and Miracle on his feet, and being able to hear that blasted old clock ticking again from the library. It’s knowing that all of it will happen again one day soon.

The following morning, Dean ends up in the kitchen amid the remains of lunch, scrubbing the crud off one of the saucepans, whistling, and it occurs to him that he’s the happiest he’s ever been.

So he can’t explain why he’s breathing so fast. In, out, in, choppy and broken, no time for his lungs to fully expand or contract. He can’t explain why his chest hurts, a radiating mass shoving up from his center like food gone down the wrong pipe. He catches at the counter, but his hands slip, a dish shatters on the floor, and suddenly he’s on the floor too, knocking his elbow hard against the cupboard and then heaving into his knees, tears blurring his eyes and his vision blacking around the edges. 

His heart—his—maybe his heart’s—with the life he’s lived, maybe—All he can do is gasp and gasp, try to get air that just isn’t there. The water is still running.

That’s how Cas finds him, a dull flap and rustle of displaced air, then muffled calls of his name. Sparks dance in front of Dean’s eyes. He grabs for Cas’s coat, his hands barely following orders, and heaves and chokes, and blinks and blinks, but his eyes won’t clear and that makes it worse because if this really is his heart giving out, if this is the last time he gets to see Cas—

A trickle of cool white; Cas is cradling his face, kneeling in front of him, his eyes wide and his brow creased. It slides through Dean, the freshest of waters. Dean drags in a full breath at last, huge and sweet.

“Cas,” he tries. Cas moves even closer, his legs folding between Dean’s now, his hands weaving gently up into Dean’s hair and rubbing there just behind his temples.

“Dean. Breathe.”

He does. He tries.

“The Djinn,” he rasps—he still can’t _breathe_ —he clutches Cas’s coat. “What if, what if it’s still that, what if—”

**

He sits, his back against the cabinet with his knees bent up and his head in his hands, and listens to Sam explain what happened in that barn, the Djinn, and the dream he’d coaxed out of Dean one drunken night that Dean barely remembers. He listens, tense all through, and he counts his own heartbeats, thankful that he still has them.

Cas’s hand remains on his shoulder. _The_ shoulder. It does more for him than any deep breathing could.

Thing is, he doesn’t actually think he’s anywhere but the hard and cold reality he’s come to call home. There’s dirt in the grout of the kitchen and bathrooms, pollen that Miracle drags in on his fur, flecks of sand shaken out of his boot treads on the stairs. Engine oil under Dean’s fingernails that all the washing in the world won’t banish. The way his skin itches when he’s spent too long under the belly of one of the cars, and crust in the corners of his eyes when he first wakes up. If there’s one thing the Djinn never get right, it’s the microscopic filth of everyday living. He knows this is real.

He just feels like an imposter, like he bought this illegally. It’s nothing he deserves but somehow he convinced someone to give it to him, smarmed his way into paradise with no clue how to hold onto it. He looks through his fingers at Cas, still kneeling between his feet and frowning at Sam’s narrative. Dean looks at the way their legs cross each other, and it makes his eyes burn. Why should he get his Cas when so many other people have lost theirs? What makes him so damn special?

Some part of him—a dumbass part, he now realizes—had hoped to be rid of this darkness. For Cas’s return to have filled all the black holes in his heart, for all his quietly suppurating wounds to close themselves up for good. But he still remembers Hell, and he still remembers dying; he remembers the Mark eating into his forearm and Michael bashing his skull to smithereens from the inside, and he still remembers the knives that stuck between his ribs with every loss of every family member and friend. He remembers hanging on by his fingernails, drowning in alcohol and in making evil things bleed. 

He draws a deep breath, one that must catch the others’ attention, because Sam’s talking ceases.

No. No, this shit is only back if he lets it in, Dean decides, clenching his jaw until it hurts. And he is not fucking doing that, not today. He’s alive, his brother is alive, and he has Cas back against all insane odds. They’re home. He was happy. He _is_ happy. And he’ll be damned if he sits by and allows this bullshit to rob him of that.

He gets up off the floor, disentangling himself from Cas and rubbing his hands on his jeans. “Okay. I need to drive.”

They both stare at him. Dean draws a deep breath, shakes himself out, and doesn’t meet their eyes. Time alone. Time alone always—

Understanding makes him stumble on his way out of the kitchen. He pauses in the doorway, rests his hand on the jamb and doesn’t turn. Can’t quite look as he makes the decision not to fall back into old habits. As he asks: 

“One of you, uh. One of you wanna come with me?”

**

Sam joins him. Dean doesn’t recall a single word spoken. He feels numb. His head hurts, and his chest is still too tight for comfort. But the waiting silence is even thicker as Cas and Sam exchange... whatever it is they exchange that leads to his brother shadowing his steps to the garage.

The sun lowers behind the trees, casting long shadows across the road, but the sky is clear and bluing toward twilight, and the road is empty. His baby’s purr goes a long way to settling torn nerves. 

“Guess I haven’t slowed down enough,” he says to the asphalt winding away before them. He ticks his fingers on the wheel. “Till now.”

Sam utters an agreeable grunt but nothing more. He looks relaxed, slouched as low as his giraffe legs will allow with one elbow propped on the windowsill. But there’s weight again in the car, just as there had been in the kitchen. Dean rubs his eye and blinks clear of residual fog.

“I thought—I don’t know what I thought.” It’s not as hard to speak these things aloud as he expected. He knows it has to do with being in his first home, with his oldest and best friend. “Magic fix-it. Something. Things were looking up.”

He knows he has PTSD. Has known it. His father had it, not just from Mom’s death but from his tours before that. Sam has it, will certainly have it forever. Cas surely has it, or the angelic equivalent. And Dean, well, he’s kind of come to feel over the years like he’s the poster child for trauma induced stress and all the bad ways to handle it. 

Still, he went and got happy. He let down his guard. 

“It’s like this... hole. In the ground. It’s deep. Or—” Okay, something else, until he can make the analogy flow right out. “Or it’s a fight. A war.” He drums his fingers, thinking about Charlie and costumes, people lined up on a grassy field. It makes him smile, which makes it easier. “But this war, I already fought, and I already won. And. I used all of my weapons, every last one of them, and a lot of those weapons broke.”

Sam is silent, listening. Dean clears his throat.

“So I won this fight but it comes back. And—” Hell, analogy, go for broke. “And the air tastes the same, like, like a mass grave or, you know, blood soaked three feet into the dirt. And I’m right back in it, just... _shaking..._ but it’s not just the fight I’m seeing, it’s the whole damn _war_ laid out in front of me again, and I know, _I know_ I’m about to fight it all over again.” He feels sick, can taste it gunking up behind his teeth, and he feels like he’ll never be ready to look at it.

He remembers how hard he fought to climb out of this pit, and how, so many times, he just barely made it.

“And I look for those weapons but most of them are gone, and I’m so...so fucking scared, Sam. I’m terrified. Because—”

“Because you barely won last time, skin of your teeth, how could you possibly win it again?”

Dean blinks, then pulls the car over onto gravelly dirt. He shuts her down, grips the wheel once, then turns to face Sam. 

Sam looks too pale around the mouth, and sad, and so tired. But he’s also smiling, just a faint little thing. “I know,” he says, looking out the windshield.

“You…” Dean presses his lips shut and frowns down at his hands, still locked around the steering wheel. It’s not like he hasn’t noticed, but damn it, every time. Every time Lucifer came back, every time he was allowed to sneer in Sammy’s face, Sam fought the war. Drowned in that ocean. Just let go of the edges of that pit and tumbled back down into the dark. Until he couldn’t fall anymore, so he grabbed hold again and, as much as he didn’t want to, as much as he just wanted to rest this time, he started climbing.

And when Lucifer played them both that last time, cut Dean with Cas’s voice and barged his way back into Sam’s home—

Dean swipes his eyes. If he could kill Lucifer, again, _again._ Again, until he burns his and his brother’s blood free of this stain. He hates himself for ever standing by, even when he had to. For letting Lucifer back into their lives. For watching it happen.

But this… Okay, this is what he does. He turns away from his own pain and concentrates the significant heft of his fury on another’s, and that’s how he hides. So today, he grits his teeth and lets Sam carry his own weight for a while, and he looks back at his own war.

“How do we get free?” Baby’s comforts have limits; he grips and regrips the wheel, and it doesn’t soothe this time so much as remind him of all the pain he’s packed into this beautiful car over the years. Fights he’s had. Shouting matches and broken glass. Blood on the dashboard. “I’m so tired, Sam. I’m tired of bringing people into this. Pulling people down.” _People I love, more than I even love to live._ “How can I possibly fight this again?”

Sam grimaces. “I can’t tell you that. But you’re not going to be doing it alone. So we’ll use... new weapons. Not just made for one person.”

Dean’s throat aches, so much so that any answer he might give would never have made it out. 

He lets go of the wheel at last and slides across to the center of the bench, and he wraps his arms around his baby brother, and they hug. And Dean cries into his brother’s shoulder until Sam’s shirt is wet, and it’s okay.

**

Dean closes the bunker’s door on an orange and purple twilight. It’s warm inside, and still, the only sounds Sam’s footsteps as he trudges down the stairs and the slurp of the milkshake they picked up after… after. Dean feels loosened and flat, a blank palette waiting for the first smears of paint.

He finds Cas in the library, one hand running absently through Miracle’s fur. Sam’s whistle brings the dog up and out in a flurry of toenail clicks and panting. Sam will take him for a run, and that’s how he’ll unwind tonight. But Dean wants something else, something he rarely turns to.

He sits down across from Cas with a sigh. “Hey.”

Cas covers Dean’s hand with his own. After a moment, Dean turns his hand over, palm up, and threads their fingers.

“Do you know what I said to Chuck? At the end, right before Jack took his power.”

Cas shakes his head.

“I said I’d kill Sam.” He can look at the wall. The wall, that can’t stare back in horror. “We’d kill each other. Whatever Chuck wanted, if he’d only bring _you_ back.”

It’s shameful. But he can’t feel shame, only despair. 

Cas shifts a little. Such an un-Cas thing to do. “Dean,” he says after a loaded moment, “you said what you had to.”

His eyes prickle. “Cas, part of me meant it, so bad. That’s what you mean to me. That’s... That’s how much I...”

“Thank you. For being willing to give so much.”

It’s cresting again, this wave he thought had flushed out, and there’s no stopping it. He lets his shoulders shake, lets himself cry again. Lets himself feel bad for not feeling bad, for meaning every inch of it and hating himself anyway. Cas comes around the table, sits beside him, and doesn’t interrupt.

Finally, Dean wipes his eyes and leans back, turning his face to the ceiling. His throat hurts and his head is thumping, but he feels somewhat lighter. Unchained to whatever rock he has sat upon for so long.

“Shit.” He wipes his eyes again. “This is like splitting a boil and squeezing all the pus out.”

“Graphic,” Cas intones, and Dean snorts. “But appropriate.”

“Hurts.”

Cas nods. His brow is creased, thoughts turned inward. He reaches up after a second and cards his fingers through Dean’s hair. Dean leans in and lets him.

“Do you know what Jack told me?” Cas asks.

Dean frowns. He has no base of reference, a hundred, a thousand things Jack could have told Cas at any time.

Cas’s fingers slide continually through his hair, lulling. “When he brought me back. I’d never seen him like that before. He said he went to visit you, that while he was here, he touched you and he saw you then.”

The way Cas is looking at him right now wrings Dean’s heart.

“He said he could see you going, in little pieces, right in front of him. That you were dying, Dean.”

Dean shuts his eyes. “Cas...”

“Not that you would end your own life.” Cas’s hand continues its hypnotic stroke “But that part of you considered it over already, and that part was thriving.”

Dean remembers that hug in the kitchen, the way Jack’s arms had seized around him so tightly. The way he’d stiffened, and Dean, too caught up in guilt, had barely tried to interpret it as anything other than relief on Jack’s part. He sighs and rubs his face, careful not to disturb Cas’s endless trek through his hair. Never really _had_ had the chance to explain clinical depression to Jack, how it always lurked, waiting for the defenses to come down, then sopping up over the sides of the worn-out container he keeps packing it into. 

Though after Cas’s... After what happened to Cas, he’s not sure he would have known the words to make Jack really understand.

“I wasn’t going to end it,” he says quietly. “I couldn’t. Not when you had just...”

 _Bought my life with yours. Hit me over the head with the kind of worth you think I have._ He knows Cas can hear him now, again. The fact that he’s listening doesn’t even bother Dean. Not anymore. He’ll take it, and a million other of what he once thought of as tiny inconveniences, invasions, oversteps—They all mean Cas is here. He’ll take Cas, and all the bells and whistles.

“I meant it,” Cas says. “Every word.”

Dean squeezes his eyes shut, but they burn anyway. “I know.”

“In the kitchen, you asked what makes you special.”

Dean raises his head to find Cas looking at him. It makes him smile, fond and faint. “You listening in?”

“I listen to what you ask me to hear.”

Dean wants to touch him right then, so badly.

“You are loved,” Cas says, simple. “Sam loves you, and I love you. Eileen, Donna, Jody and Claire. Your friends from New Mexico. Jack loves you.”

“Jack loves everyone these days,” Dean mutters, wiping at his nose. Fuck, he misses that kid.

Cas’s exhale tickles Dean’s cheek. “It’s not the same. You know that.”

He does know that. He nods, still looking down, and sniffs. Cas takes his hand, winding their fingers back together.

“Maybe,” Dean starts, meaning to say _maybe I’m just too sad, maybe like this I’m no good for you. Maybe I’m like the Shadow, sucking up every morsel of goodness. Maybe you should go._ But the mere idea sticks like putty, and his entire being struggles to eject it.

He feels rage, brief and hot, at the version of him that always relied on that worldview.

Cas looks at him with knowing eyes, and for a long second, Dean stares back, lost. 

Well, the hell with that. Dean’s not going to tell him to go. Dean’s going to trust Castiel to do what he wants to do, what he feels is necessary and right. It’s way past time he gave him that sort of loyalty.

“This isn’t ever going away,” he explains, soft. Just wants to keep looking at Cas’s face.

“I know.” Cas sounds sad, and resigned to it. “I’ve tried to heal it before.”

And that’s a thump right to his heart, thinking of Cas trying again and again, in troubled silence, to fix what can’t be fixed. “But it’s not something—Cas, I know what to do with it. How to make it shut up, for a while at least. I live with it, and I try to keep it...sleepy.” Like the Empty, he thinks, offhand. How strange. But right: the place you go to live forever in your regrets. “And I’m not the same person as I was before you died. What you said to me… You made sure I wasn’t.”

Cas’s brow creases, so Dean grips his hand and thinks thoughts at him: a grief he didn’t recognize, a different kind of grief than ever before. Deciding to be the man Cas saw instead of running from that version of himself, going for what he wanted because Cas thought it worthwhile that he, Dean, be happy. Waking every day with _That is who you are_ on the back of his tongue. Shaving, brushing his teeth, then saying the words to himself in the fogged up mirror.

Dean also would have told Jack that part of you does die, sometimes, but that fighting back, fighting out of it, creates more of you.

“I know parts of me aren’t coming back,” he says, and places his other hand over their joined fingers. “I know parts of you aren’t either. That’s just the way this works. But the me that’s here now, and the you that’s here… Cas, we know each other. We make each other better, and that’s, that’s what I want now. I want to be better, for me and for you. That’s the me I want.”

Cas touches his face. “He’s always been there, Dean. I promise you that.”

If anyone would know, Castiel, who once touched every last facet of Dean’s soul, would be the one. 

**

The days warm as they turn toward spring. More visitors: Charlie and Stevie and Bobby and Max. Dean has good days and bad days, and he stays sharp, on the lookout for those new weapons; they aren’t what he’s used to looking for.

On a Thursday, he finds Castiel outside, eyes far away as he watches the sun set in primrose pinks and lilacs behind a copse of trees. Cas looks old and also ageless, squinting into the sunlight that—that he’s also probably actually stared into, real unfiltered radiation blazing out of a star ninety million miles away—and Dean doesn’t remember when he started smiling, just that it’s there, small and wistful, when Cas turns to face him at last. 

Cas’s expression changes, so gently that it taps Dean’s heart sideways in his chest. Cas’s arms come around him. He backs Dean slowly into the bunker’s outer wall, leans him up against flat brick, and presses him there with the length of his body. He kisses Dean over and over, Dean’s leg hooking around Cas’s, the wall cold through his flannel shirt and the winter breeze nipping over his cheeks, his nose, his wrist where Cas’s fingers play with his leather band. He loses himself in Cas’s mouth, held firm in place while the world turns.

And Dean thinks: For all that Cas stares into the sun, he never looks at the sun the way he looks at Dean.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

>  **TRIGGER WARNING:** There is a somewhat violent nightmare, a panic attack, and an in-depth exploration of clinical depression which may hit close to home for those who suffer from it. I don't know. This particular analogy is kind of a personal truth for me but should not be read as the standard. Mentions of canon trauma for both Winchester brothers, including possession, and reference to what Lucifer did to Sam. BRIEF discussion of someone mistaking something for suicidal ideation. No suicidal ideation actually occurs.
> 
> Thank you to coffeejunkii for beta-reading!


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